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This topic comprises 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Author
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Topic: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 09-12-2009 08:01 PM
Location: Carmike 8, Lawton, OK
Auditorium: #7
Format: 35mm 'scope, Smart optical stereo
Rating: 3 stars out of 4
The presentation quality was good, but with the drawback: it wasn't shown with DTS audio. The theater hasn't shown any movies on film in nearly a year. Apparently the distributor had the stipulation any movie theater that had any film projection capability at all had to show the movie on 35mm. That's all fine and good as long as the theater's film equipment is still working great and there is enough staff members on site who remember how to operate it properly.
One thing I don't understand with the "film purist" distribution angle: this movie was post produced via digital intermediate. Chances are good it was the usual, de facto 2K resolution digital intermediate. To this day not very many movies get a 4K DI. If the 35mm release prints were sourced from a 2K DI what's the damned point in making an all D-cinema equipped movie theater run the movie on film?
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Inglorius Basterds was definitely a pretty big improvement over QT's last effort, Death Proof. Nevertheless, I still grew tired at times of the extended passages of dialog. We're watching a 2.5 hour long movie, not reading a 1000 page novel where dialog works more as a driving element. Yes, the dialog was well written (as usual in any QT movie), but we need only so much of that. Get to the damned point of the scene already and allow the movie to move on to some action.
Christoph Waltz was impressive as Col. Hans Landa. How many languages does this guy speak? According to his IMDB profile, Christop Waltz really is fluent in German, English, French and Italian. I laughed when he pulled out that huge Sherlock Holmes looking pipe early in the movie. It made the other guy's pipe puny in comparison. That's not a pipe! Action movies are always more fun when the bad guy is very intelligent and very capable. Christoph Waltz certainly made his character seem capable of just about any evil deed.
The character name, Hans Landa threw me for a second. Here in Lawton the History and Government Dept. Chairman at Cameron University is Dr. Lance Janda. So I had to fight it a little bit to get that local name out of my head whenever Hans Landa was chewing the scenery.
I think Christoph Waltz has a slight resemblance to Geoffrey Rush. I also think Til Schweiger (Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz) has a slight resemblance to John Savage. I almost mistook the guy for John Savage even though Savage is 14 years older.
Brad Pitt was decent as Aldo Raine. He had plenty of good lines and some good comic moments. Still, even though Pitt was born in Oklahoma and raised in Missouri his southern accent sounded pretty fake.
Aldo Raine had a makeup effects scar across his neck as if his character had survived an attempted hanging or throat slashing. Did I miss some part of the movie that explained that scar on his neck? Or was it just there as a how'd he get that, unexplained character trait? I found it distracting.
quote: Joe Redifer
It used the same "chapter" stuff and even the same font.
QT's font choices in titling kind of drive me up the wall sometimes. It's like he got hold of a copy of CorelDRAW and its collection of 1000 fonts (mostly Bitstream, URW and ITC typefaces) and then went nuts creating title schemes with about as much logic as a ransom note or the kinds of shit you'll get from some tiny "fast sign" shop.
Some of the titles are in Palatino and then a sans like Avant Garde. And then let's throw in some Friz Quadrata Bold! At least he didn't set anything in fucking Arial or Comic Sans! Didn't see any Trajan used either. But you don't get Trajan with CorelDRAW. Gotta buy some Adobe products to get Trajan Pro.
Spoiler Alert - Click to Toggle
The one bit of titling work I did like was the huge, rock star themed "Hugo Stiglitz" logo thrown up ahead of the bloody montage ala the legend of Hugo
quote: John Wilson
It is extremely graphic in its violence.
Regarding the level of violence, I didn't find it anymore graphic or disturbing than any of QT's previous films. The movie does have a few bloody, violent scenes. But they're not the most graphic I've seen out of Tarantino's movies. In QT's last movie you see a car tire peel out over some brunette chick's face! The violence of Inglorius Basterds happens in very short bursts in between very long passages of dialog.
When it comes to baseball bat violence, in my opinion Casino arguably has the most grisly baseball bat scene ever shown in movies. It's easily more graphic than anything seen Inglorious Basterds or The Untouchables. I can't think of anything worse. Anyone else, please feel free to offer your opinion of the worst baseball bat violence movie scene.
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Christian Appelt
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 505
From: Frankfurt, Germany
Registered: Dec 2001
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posted 09-28-2009 02:12 PM
Marin Zorica wrote: quote:
Yea, no spool boxes, but Ernemann VII and VIIB was made with spool boxes because of fire protection, this should be Ernemann VII, not VIIB, because VII was produced from 1933, and B sterted after WW2 [Smile]
Actually the VIIB was introduced in the 1930s (I didn't really know that, just looked it up ![[Wink]](wink.gif) ), so it does fit into a WWII movie.
Found that in "Zeiss Ikon Kinotechnisches Handbuch" (Manual of Cinema Technology), published bei Zeiss Ikon/Ernemann in 1937, it has some photos and numbers on early Ernemann models.
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Christian Appelt
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 505
From: Frankfurt, Germany
Registered: Dec 2001
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posted 03-18-2012 08:56 AM
The 35mm print of INGLORIUS BASTERDS I saw yesterday was almost perfect in terms of image quality. This is how anamorphic photography should look in a release print: sharp and detailed, rock-steady and with little or no grain visible.
As for the movie, it certainly didn't feel like 152 minutes. Some fine acting, some not so good. The opening scene at the farm shows that Tarantino is an excellent director, he keeps the camera on the actors, but when he starts moving it in a semicircle, he also moves the audience. Far away from the usual stupid "always keep the camera moving because the audience might fall asleep" style in contemporary filmmaking.
I suppose the film is what QT intended, but here are some things I didn't like:
Sometimes there are reasons for being incorrect in technical matters, if you want to make something easier to understand for the audience. But since part of the story takes place in a cinema and actual work in the booth is shown, I don't see a positive reason NOT do it right.
- When the girl does a reel changeover (it has been mentioned previously here), we see seven or eight seconds of image running on the incoming projector before she switches over. No leader, no "ne jamais couper cet amorce".
Now, if she was doing changeover to her own, newly shot "big face" announcement, then of course it would not matter at what point the feature film is interrupted. No need for watching the c/o cues either.
But since she spliced the "big face" footage into the next reel, there is no point in messing up the preceding reel change because that would rather bring some Nazi watchdog to the booth. It just makes no sense. The cues (scraped circle with a cross) are a joke, I mean, this is supposed to be a premiere with Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and every other Nazi leader in the theatre, but a new print is marked to look like after five years of subrun showing?
- Nice idea, storing 350 feature prints (1.200-1.500 reels) on a shelf. But if you run it from open reels, you are clearly not afraid. I doubt there was an European country where the law did not demand spool boxes. (Maybe open reels look more interesting to the camera, but they could easily have enlarged the wire-mesh ports and put stronger lights in the spool boxes so you could see the reels turning).
- The movie shown, "Stolz der Nation" (Pride of the Nation) is total BS. The Nazi party did use film for propaganda, but after two films about the early days of their "movement", HITLERJUNGE QUEX and HANS WESTMAR, Goebbels never greenlighted another film of that kind. Even in their war newsreels (Deutsche Wochenschau), the propaganda ministery made sure that no dead bodies were shown. Goebbels believed in using historical epics, like he did with KOLBERG directed by Veit Harlan. It told the story of the defence of a besieged fortress town against French troops in 1807 and was full of references to Nazi ideology and actual war situations of 1939-1944. Kolberg came out in 1945 and was termed a "Durchhaltefilm" which could be translated as "Keep fighting movie".
So there is no way a film like STOLZ DER NATION would have been produced or used for propaganda by the Third Reich. When war action came to Germany, Goebbels gave the audiences more light entertainment, even moving production to Vienna and Prague because locations and studios were bombed in Germany. Cinematography, lighting and editing of the scenes shown is completely out of style, I guess QT had seen Pontecorvos's BATTLE OF ALGIERS before from which he also took the great Ennio Morricone music.
- Christopher Waltz is the only actor to speak German that fits the period, maybe being Austrian did help. The younger German actors speak rather contemporary. This is not interesting to English speaking audiences, but it does make a difference. They got it much better in DOWNFALL (Der Untergang, 2004), especially the character of Joseph Goebbels.
It was an OK movie, certainly better than DEATH PROOF although I was disappointed that the Basterds were only secondary characters. And like Bobby, I found QT's title fonts painful to watch.
BTW, the running 35mm projectors didn't sound very Ernemann to me. Is it possible they just used the more familiar Simplex sound?
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 03-19-2012 04:50 AM
quote: Christian Appelt
Sometimes there are reasons for being incorrect in technical matters, if you want to make something easier to understand for the audience. But since part of the story takes place in a cinema and actual work in the booth is shown, I don't see a positive reason NOT do it right.
I guess, like most Tarantino movies, you shouldn't take it all too serious. It was always supposed to have a "spaghetti western" feel. They did a better job of depicting a realistic Adolf Hitler in "Der Untergang" too, but I guess, that wasn't really the point here .
quote:
- Christopher Waltz is the only actor to speak German that fits the period, maybe being Austrian did help. The younger German actors speak rather contemporary. This is not interesting to English speaking audiences, but it does make a difference. They got it much better in DOWNFALL (Der Untergang, 2004), especially the character of Joseph Goebbels.
Well, at least it was believable German by (mostly) German actors and believable French by (mostly) French actors, unlike so many other Hollywood productions. I'm "not so fluent" in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc. but I guess a lot of locals also have a good laugh at many of the foreing language depictions in many multi-million-dollar Hollywood spectacles .
I'm wondering how the German general release version of this movie was handled. Were the English parts dubbed in German or did they use subtitles?
I really really HATE dubbed versions, yet you Germans seem to love them . I still remember seeing Sweeney Todd in a German dubbed version. That was really awfull, because the spoken parts were dubbed over in German and the melodic parts were all in their original voices with subtitles. It felt like one of those cheap Russian dubs/voice overs, where they use the same voice for all actors and you can still hear the original voices on the background.
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Christian Appelt
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 505
From: Frankfurt, Germany
Registered: Dec 2001
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posted 03-19-2012 08:15 AM
Tony,
I had the same thought about the shipping containers. In France, Germany and many other European countries film prints are traditionally shipped on cores. There are a few exceptions, like the big Italian Cinebox which contains two 6000 ft reels. Only in East Germany (German Democratic Republic) they had hexagonal shipping boxes similiar to the U.S. type, but made from green plastic, and not for reels but for prints on cores.
I'm not sure about the U.K., how were prints shipped back then?
Marcel,
yes, it just a movie! It's not really that important, but I wonder why almost every time film projection is depicted in films, they get it messed up. Have you ever seen the Columbo episode MAKE ME A PERFECT MURDER? They explain the changeover process, and it is actually important for Columbo to solve the case - and when they show the c/o, it's wrong!
Luckily I didn't see the dubbed version of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS but an OV with subtitles. All the French and English lines were subtitled in German.
Wikipedia says that for the dubbed version all English dialogue was dubbed to German, but not how they handled the French language. It became necessary to change some scenes like the interrogation of Corporal Butz by the basterds where Wicki translates Aldo Raine's questions to German and Butz's answers back to English.
Yeah, the dubbing...not all of us like it. Actually, it was a byproduct of re-education and WW2. Around 1946/47, there was a competetive fight for the German cinema market. National film industries of the four Allied nations created new dubbing facilities in record time to get their own product into German theatres. During the Third Reich, audiences had not seen but very few foreign films and were not used to original versions. To this day, most German people grow up with dubbed movies and TV, regarding subtitles and OV as something arty. This has changed a bit with DVD and - at least in some cities - more theatres that play the original versions of new movies.
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